The Korean Fair Trade Commission raided the studio's Seoul office to gather evidence as to whether or not Blizzard violated the country's law. There had been complaints in Korea that Blizzard was refusing to refund players who purchased and were attempting to return Diablo III.

Miffed punters who couldn't log into the game were denied a full refund by Blizzard, which said that it was under no obligation to do so under the game's contract. The studio claims that it has a strict policy of "no refunds" in the country if a product is used.

Players complained to the FTC and the commission responded by launching an investigation. The investigation will sort through the seized documents and evidence to see if there is a possible violation of Korea's electronic commerce and commercial contracts law.

Apparenlyt Diablo III players are not to be messed with and the FTC had loads of complaints. Blizzard has since vowed to increase server capacity, to improve the game for players but it is not going to give anyone's money back.

Sony is now confirming what our sources were telling us last week. The PlayStation Network will return to operation at some point this week. Some services will be available to start with and more are being turned up later in the week, with all services to be back online before the end of the month.

When the PlayStation Network starts to come back on line later this week, it will be phased in region by region and it will require a mandatory system update that will also force users to change their password. As part of this process, Sony will also be moving to expedite their already-in-progress data center move and expansion. Apparently, while not exactly related, Sony was already in the process of moving to a new data center facility.

Sony will be offering a “Welcome Back” program that will include giving users free access to all of the PSN Premium benefits for a month. In addition, Sony will be throwing in 30 days of free access to Qriocity. Whispers we hear suggest that some additional bonus might also be offered to users, but as of yet we don’t know any details on that. From our understanding, the following services will be the first to return when the PSN is again available: Online play for both PS3 and PSP systems, Access to music for existing Qriocity subscribers on the PS3 & PSP, Account management/password reset, Ability to download un-expired movie rentals on PS3/PSP/Media Go, PlayStation Home, Friends List, and Chat functionality.

While most PSN users will be happy to see the service return, we have to admit that it has given the PNS a very black eye. Hopefully, we will not see a rash of fraudulent credit card usage that is linked to this breach, and Sony’s improvements will prevent anything like this from happening again. Still, we have spoken to many end users that have already sold their PS3 and moved to the Xbox 360 over this issue. We don’t believe that this is an isolated situation, so we doubt the full impact to Sony will be known for some time.

After Activision put the Tony Hawk franchise on the shelf, imagine our surprise to learn that Hawk himself told Pixelated Geek that it is likely they will be doing something for 2012.

The news is a bit surprising, as the last two games to bear his name that featured that skateboard peripheral were not well received (or very successful from a financial point of view). This led to Activision to putting the franchise in limbo while the publisher plotted the next move.

Over 16 versions of the game have borne Hawk’s name, which makes it one of the longest and most successful franchises in video game history. If another Tony Hawk was in the works, it would have to re-invent itself and produce something unique. It would have little trouble from competitors, as both Electronic Art’s Skate franchise and the Shaun White Skateboarding attempt by Ubisoft both appear to be on hold at the moment.

It is questionable about the level that action sports seem to have in the video gaming market these days, but that has not stopped EA from going back to the well with a reboot of the SSX franchise. It could be that with the release of SSX that action sports video games could again experience a comeback, and maybe Activision wants to be there to cash in.